Political use for Loomio

Your perspective is really powerful @roslyn . I doubt we would have time to engage in an extended political theory discussion here, although that is kind of the thread topic!

You seem to be arguing for simple majority rule above because you perceive supermajority to be highly subject to obstructionism. To me, that seems roughly equivalent to saying that consensus process itself is highly subject to obstructionism. My general answer is that yes, both processes are quite vulnerable to obstructionism if they aren't used skillfully, and if they don't have resilient tools and strategies for dealing with dissent.

It might help me if you could explain how you feel about consensus decision-making per se, because that's the general philosophy of Loomio.

@roslyn I think “consultative representation” would work for now, once there are plenty of decisions to be discussed by the law-makers/government that a common person doesn't understand and or doesn't have time to deal with all of them. That's why we still need politicians, people that will dedicate themselves to deal with lesser importance discussions to keep the group (city, state or country) running. BUT these elected must give the option to society to decide about the most important topics. That's where these tools would fit perfectly: to give this access IF the society wants to participate.
As you, I also intend to run for elections in 2016 and using this tools is part of my project.

@alandavison 'Vote na web' brings something good when its brief text "translate" the law being discussed from lawyers language to something ordinary people can understand. This stimulate more people to participate. But it's very important to keep this writing neutral.
I'm talking to the 'Vote na web' team to find ways to explore the tool the way I mentioned above, once they have infrastructure costs that must be considered.

@gregorycassel Yes, well sometimes, due to my background, I do feel like I hail from the Dungeon Dimensions where everything is a bit more rough and ready. I have seen obstructionism skillfully deployed to great effect more than once in my life, so it is certainly something that occurs to me as a potential problem.

I do think that it is good to try to achieve consensus and the deliberation is certainly useful for this. However, I don't think it's a very good idea to hold out on it or on supermajority rule as a requirement for decision-making, because it can be so easily abused (although I would be very interested in hearing any possibilities for effectively dealing with this situation...so please share).
I think someone earlier (maybe it was you) kind of hit on this, when they pointed out that Loomio is obviously completely voluntary. I think therefore, it probably attracts people who are mainly nice people and willing to genuinely engage with others. So as long as that is the case, consensus is probably A-OK. But if you were to roll it out to a wider audience...well...the world is not in the state it is because everyone is a perfectly nice person.

Also, quite apart from that, I would say, in the corner against consensus as a feasible outcome here, that there are often real pros and cons to any issue, therefore - why would everyone agree? There is often no one right answer, if you get my drift. Plus there are just different types of people in the world - maybe A is more important to you, but B is more important to me. Both A and B are reasonable things to want and (for whatever reason) it isn't possible to have both at the same time.
I would think that it would be better for sound decision-making to agree to disagree quite a lot of the time, without, however, hamstringing your ability to take action during that time (since often doing anything at all is preferable do doing nothing).
Personally, I would feel more comfortable being on the losing side of a debate, able to cast my vote in good faith against whatever is being voted on, and knowing that I've been able to have my say without holding everyone else up. If I knew that I was genuinely the only hold-out and everyone else wanted to do something else, I would probably cave in for the sake of keeping the peace. But is that best for long-term decision-making? After all, maybe time will tell that I was right, or maybe the society wasn't ready for my favoured proposal at the time, but will be someday. I think that if consensus is enforced (as opposed to just being a general goal), it actually puts everyone under unnecessary social pressure.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed feedback @roslyn ! I tried to write a reasonably concise reply, but this subject feels complex to me, so I ended up with an essay I was planning to write anyway. (Though it's pretty rough for now.) You can check it out here if you'd like.

The upshot of the essay, basically, is this: I think that both simple majority and supermajority processes provide excellent opportunities for both progress and obstruction. To me, it's mainly a matter of how issues are chosen and framed, and who's doing the choosing.

@roslyn Thanks for the insightful comment ..

Also, quite apart from that, I would say, in the corner against consensus as a feasible outcome here, that there are often real pros and cons to any issue, therefore - why would everyone agree? There is often no one right answer

This is something that not only affects voting for a proposal but also during the discussion phase. I have been discussing this in another post Agree with statements instead of adding New.

Rather than simply a chronological list of comments (posts) we are discussing different views of said posts. Thanks do @dnephin for the following..

My idea for solving this problem (of being able to scale discussion making) was:

• keep the discussion and the “decision” together, not as separate things. Every comment had to have some “position” (support, agree, challenge, disagree, flag), which is very similar to the proposal portion of loomio.

• all posts would be responses to a specific piece of data or sentence in the proposal. Allowing people to disagree with some portion of a proposal and agree with other portions of it.

• handle some of the complexity by exposing all of the posts as more of a graph instead of a linear list of posts. So every post could have comments on it, forming a directred graph.

The idea with the user interface is that instead of seeing a chronological list of posts, or something like reddit where you can see the nesting, you would instead look at posts in the context they belong. So if you clicked on a proposal, you’d start by seeing some posts for each position, and if you click on one of those you’d see the parent context, and all responses to the post, and so on down the graph.

@gregorycassel I followed the link and read your essay. I see from your blog that you dislike "groupthink" and "blocking" which has also been evident in your posts on Loomio.

You raise some interesting points. I am not a student of politics with a small "p" or capital "P" but like you I did spend some time "evaluating myself" reading about philosophy, religion, psychology and cognitive processes to name but a few.

I don't think your objection to a "block" facility should cloud your judgement of Loomio. Right now it is "horses for courses" as they say. You wouldn't have a racehorse pull a plough (unless you had no other option) and Loomio isn't currently designed for "large scale political organisations"

As a group process much of the "Storming" has been done and the "Forming" and "Norming" stages are under way. This is our opportunity to beta test the new 1.0 platform to see how well it performs for us as individuals, members of groups or group coordinators. The testing and feedback we provide will lead to an improved user experience.

I am interested in the points raised in this discussion topic and spend a lot of time following up on posted links, articles, web sites and theories floated in these groups. I try to keep my posts short partly due to time constraints, partly due to my view that short, succinct posts make for a more engaging, easier to follow and less off putting discussion for new members to the group. And, lastly because I am posting in several groups to provide Interface / Useability and Feature Ideas and feedback.

I think it would be useful if the essay prone were to work on a collaborative document discussing the "political implications of online voting systems" or "supermajority - it's minority rule by another name".

The real benefit of Loomio was it's departure from the Forum style commenting with huge swathes of text to read and disseminate. Perhaps use Loomio to discuss a particular issue or component of a problem and test it that way?

@alandavison I'm sorry I don't know where a misunderstanding may have arisen-- I'm quite fond of the fact that Loomio has a block mechanism.

In that essay, I wrote "For that reason, I tend to think that an Agree/Disagree/Abstain system (like Democracy OS) is more suitable than Loomio for large scales of political organization right now." That statement is not meant in any way to criticize Loomio. In fact, I can hardly imagine being more fond of Loomio.

As far as I know, Loomio was developed for decision-making in general, of whatever sort. It has mainly been used by groups of voluntary members. (Political parties, for instance, are voluntary associations.)

I think that the agree/abstain/disagree/block concept is not only appropriate for voluntary associations, but may well prove necessary for our survival in general.

@gregorycassel perhaps I was mistaken, and confused your "block" stance with somebody else. I have been reading and posting a lot. If I did I appologise, and will have to re-read some of the discussions I have been part of.

I also watched that TED talk some time ago, and I agree that some more thought needs to go into balancing direct democracy, consultative processes and representative democracy - the term I have been using for the last 30 years (coming from Germany and grassroots politics there in the 1970s and 80s) is 'basis democracy'. The problem, of course, with internet voting is that it might degenerate into X-factor style mob rule, gravitating to lowest common denominators, if we were to implement it today. So whilst we want to enhance consultative processes, and develop internet-based technological tools that will enhance this, alongside that, it seems to me, we need a consciousness revolution. If we were to scale up Loomio beyond the association of like-minded groups who share a common mission statement and values, and wanted it to become a political tool that encourages engagement, we would have to maximise decision-making stages before it even comes to voting on proposals. People tend to vote in knee jerks, before considering the various lived realities of all the stakeholders, especially emotionally/psychologically. When I was involved in grassroots politics, I reformulated existing steps of consensus decision-making, in order to maximise the phase of mutual understanding, and even more importantly: mutual exploration of inner worlds underpinning any possible decision, before even brainstorming possible solutions. I am wondering what you all think about this kind of exploratory stage, which in larger and diverse communities tend to easily polarise and fragment, which usually leads to quickly entrenched positions?

The question I would ask is - how much difference would there be in the decisions made by a set of people that consists of elected politicians, and a set of people consisting of the eligible voters of a country? I am not convinced that a set of politicians is better than the citizens.

I am a member of an Australian political party intent on creating a hybrid of representative and direct democracy.

Just like the intentions of Pia's - El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires, we intend to encourage our country's people to elect politicians from our party, who promise to obey the outcomes of internet decisions, and take them as our vote into the representative system of Australia's Parliament.

I would imagine we will not get many people elected so it won't be any more dangerous to our political system then the one or two crazy people we have elected now. But it could possibly give our government the shake up it needs.

Hypothetical - Lets assume we get one politician elected and that after the election Australians realise that they can control this politician, and so we find that a great percentage of the population start to interact and have an input. Would the decisions made by the people be respected by other politicians? Would the other politicians see that Australia is telling them what they really want and listen, or would they try to write it off as a flawed method?

I have heard many arguments about the possible consequences of this idea, but none as well written as the ones you all post here.

I am in favour of the idea, obviously. I don't know if it will benefit or degrade the decisions made in the Australian Parliament. We will only truly know after we have tried the experiment. But remember, this idea will not dramatically change our current system unless it proves popular and people choose to vote in enough e-politicians to hold a relevant balance of power.

Let me leave you with a much deeper philosophical question. Would the decisions made by the total population reflect the nature of humanity and if so... is that nature a good thing? Do you have faith in humanity? I have chosen to trust us, while realising that if I am wrong then there is not much point anyway.

@michaelsoth Really good points raised here...

The problem, of course, with internet voting is that it might degenerate into X-factor style mob rule, gravitating to lowest common denominators, if we were to implement it today.

This is something that also worries me. At least now voters have to make some effort. Physically going to ballot boxes, or ticking a box and dropping a card in a post box.

For very simple (almost trivial*), clearly defined decisions that is not a big problem. But giving large volumes of people the ability to affect an outcome without even reading a discussion or adding something to the debate is worrying.

• see X-Factor

@lbjoum

I would imagine we will not get many people elected so it won’t be any more dangerous to our political system then the one or two crazy people we have elected now. But it could possibly give our government the shake up it needs.

This is what I was thinking when I commented earlier in this discussion but didn't articulate. I don't see "representation through consultation" as a replacement for the current system (at least not until the sorts of issues outlined here can be discussed, ratified and implemented which is going to take time and collaborative development by groups such as Loomio and Democracy.os) but like you say it is something that needs to be tested in a live political environment.

"Collaborative representatives" in government; translating policy decisions into plain, accessible language that can be discussed and voted on by a distributed population is the first step. As I have said before doing something is better than doing nothing and hoping that things will change.

@joum @michaelsoth @alandavison

I'd like to point out here that a look at the last 2000 years of civilisation might put the dangers of 'mob rule' into perspective. Also, X-Factor - while hair-raising - is not exactly a reliable measure of how the people in a society would behave, because a) who 'participates' there is self-selecting and b) participants and viewers KNOW they are operating in a consequence-free environment that encourages excess .
And the total damage that X-Factor has wreaked on the world pales into insignificance when compared with what elected politicians do every day.
The vast majority of elected representatives get their seats through loyalty to the party and always vote the party line. They also do not read, much less understand, the vast majority of motions that they vote on.
Also, as a bona fide expert, I will say that there is nothing mysterious out there that 'the people' are incapable of understanding. Most stuff just isn't really that complicated. You don't need to understand every line of a legal code to decide that eg. tax loopholes should be closed. These things are not getting done because it is really hard or complicated to do so - it's not. They are not getting done because parties are, quite literally, being paid not to. They are already well aware of what their constituents want. That they fail to fulfil that is not due to a lack of communication.

To return to mob rule: there are, I think, a few things you'd have to do to keep people as decent as they come: no anonymity in commenting and decision-making (I think the way Loomio gets people to open accounts is a really good step in this direction); force people to participate in a debate in order to be allowed to vote. That way they can't make a 'knee-jerk' decision. And then as soon as possible try to break up the cartel that is mass media. THAT is the real problem - that people are subjected to 24/7 misinformation. This takes its toll. In fact, considering what people are exposed to, I am amazed that they are as reasonable as they are.

But despite all of that, I absolutely agree with @joum - I've decided to trust in humanity, too. There actually aren't any other options.
After all, trusting in a few self-selecting, born-and-raised elite individuals hasn't, oddly enough, worked out very well for most of us.

@joum @joaomarcelloortega @alandavison @gregorycassel

Also - since a lot of us are campaigning on a Loomio-aided platform or similar, should we open a group for this, where we can keep in touch and discuss these things/try to help each other out?
The first thing the media industry will try to do is make us all look like a bunch of fringe loonies and 'dreamers', so I think having some sort of cooperation that 'normalises' this movement would be really helpful, even if we have slightly different ideas of the exact modalities of our operations. Also, if successful, how could we support Loomio financially/what would the operators feel is an appropriate contribution?

@roslyn
As always, so much to consider when reading your posts. My reference to X-Factor was more to highlight "trivial" decisions, and as you say the people who vote on these things are self-selecting.

Most stuff just isn't really that complicated. You don't need to understand every line of a legal code to decide that eg. tax loopholes should be closed. These things are not getting done because it is really hard or complicated to do so - it's not. They are not getting done because parties are, quite literally, being paid not to.

Now we are starting to highlight the real crux of the issue. As you say, large numbers of elected officials don't read or understand what they vote on and are simply following the party line. Some may have a personal agenda or focus and pay attention to certain types of legislation but again this is not representative of the people who elected them or necessarily in the best interest of the wider population.

Also - since a lot of us are campaigning on a Loomio-aided platform or similar, should we open a group for this, where we can keep in touch and discuss these things/try to help each other out?

Agreed, and since we are on this platform perhaps we should include the Loomio team and decide where is the best place to create this proposal in order to attract the attention of as many community members and Loomio users as possible.

My suggestion would be to try and "tag" comments within the discussion posts somehow to indicate the nature or focus of the information on a post, comment, paragraph or statement basis (if this is not clear please let me know and I will try to explain it better).

So many of the points you raised are not only highly relevant but should form the basis of an informed discussion.

@lbjoum I agree with you. We must give option to society to decide. We cannot elect some guys and let them decide for us. We don't know what influences are taking part in their decisions. There is a need to change something here.
When I hire a gardener, I count on his know-how to do his job based on what I want. I listen to what he has to say about the job to be done, because I don't have the technical information to do that. But the final decision is up to me. Why can't the same be valid for public management? I don't want to deal with burocracy, laws, financial control, but I want the most important things (at least) being presented to me, explained in a plain text with its benefits and consequences in a way I can vote for it. I also intend to run for elections in 2016 using this model of 'consultative representation' as a test. I'm very curious to see how will people react once I give them information and the power to decide. My responsability will be inform them, through technical analysis of my team, what their decisions will affect them. I have no right to decide something for them, unless they abdicate their decision and let that for me.

@roslyn I think that's a very good idea. We have people from different countries, cultures and scenarios here and each of us can add to an idea that can help us to improve possibilities.

When we consider the presentation of issues to be directly decided by popular vote, we must ask ourselves: who is framing the questions, how, and why?

In theory, we can have a system in which 'collective wisdom' is used to generate yes/no proposals for public voting. Perhaps it would reflect principles similar to Loomio's coming 'Ideas' feature. I'm really interested in this.

I have to say, for clarity's sake, that I'm deeply opposed to the concept of simple majority rule with respect to most decisions which coerce anyone, either through the direct discipline of behaviors (via laws) or by conscripting taxation towards purposes approved by a simple majority. My views are always subject to new information, inter-action and reflection, but it's hard to imagine how I would be convinced that a simple majority ought to be able to force up to almost 50% of a non-voluntary (citizenship) group to bend to its will.

I qualified with the word most above, because I do think that simple majority can make sense when choosing between alternatives which have been mutually agreed to be reasonably comparable. For instance, when people are choosing between two plans which strive to achieve the same results. That's kind of a tricky subject though: alternate strategies often have significantly different side effects.

I do agree entirely that there is nothing mysterious out there that ‘the people’ are incapable of understanding-- especially if we reform government towards reasonably simplicity, clarity and efficiency.

I'm very interested in these types of discussions, and I think that a related group is a great idea @roslyn . Thanks everyone for your powerful ideas here.

Why do we have to set "majority" as 50%? Why can't we set other values according to the subject? For example: 80% approval required to go on in controversial decisions or that involves lots of people. or even defining 1.5x or 2x values to votes that are directly affected by something being voted (this one may be dangerous). We don't need to follow a rule like majority = 50%+1.

@joaomarcelloortega This is something I was looking at previously and how I ended up finding Loomio.

I tested and evaluated various systems (a software engineer from a technical viewpoint looking at features, and from a UI/UX [User Interface / User Experience] point of view).

Generally I was looking at open source software because it can be forked and modified to suit a particular groups needs. One such product that ceased active development over 2 years ago was called OpenMind. Users could post an idea, suggestion, proposal or whatever and others could vote. It had a simple interface, was fairly intuitive but what set it apart was a "weighted voting system" users had 10 votes which they could use individually or as a block (there may have been a maximum number of votes for a single proposal I don't remember).

What I am trying to get at is there are a number of different ways the actual vote can be structured depending on the nature of the item being voted on. Different voting methods could be handled via plug-ins.

I have included a link for some OpenMind screenshots and also attached a couple which should display in Loomio Beta.

I was going to mockup some similar screens for Loomio and see what I could come up with for a Feature suggestion in another discussion.

@roslyn re-

Also - since a lot of us are campaigning on a Loomio-aided platform or similar, should we open a group for this, where we can keep in touch and discuss these things/try to help each other out?

It would be a delight to participate in a loomio group for this subject.

@alandavison said -

Agreed, and since we are on this platform perhaps we should include the Loomio team and decide where is the best place to create this proposal in order to attract the attention of as many community members and Loomio users as possible.

Will we wait for someone from loomio or shall one of us create it? @richarddbartlett can I trouble you to help us move forward on this?

In the meantime, I should let you know we have a loomio group that is a public area for our party. It has been silent for a while now. https://www.loomio.org/g/GRQl4yUT/sol-online-direct-democracy-australia

Our active party members use another loomio group where we isolate ourselves to focus on the work we need to do. It is open to read but not join. Some of the sub-groups are open to out side members but they are dedicated to specific task groups. https://www.loomio.org/g/nzVv8a6F/odd-core-staff-delegates

I am sorry about the number of sub-groups. We do not have this many active subgroups. Long story. We are having trouble deleting some of them.

@alandavison @joaomarcelloortega This weighted voting is also sometimes called 'cumulative voting' - it's even been used in some regional parliaments in the past. It is supposed to be a good way to help minorities push through points that are important to them while still preserving majority rule, because the idea is that minorities can choose to put all or most of their votes on points important to them and could only be overturned if others cared to do the same to them (usually harder to coordinate due to larger numbers and fractures within the 'majority'). That's the theory, anyway. It's one of my favourite ideas, also because it gives the voter more flexibility about where they want to place their votes, but caps everyone at the same level of 'vote value'. I think it keeps it more objective than say preferenda.

@lbjoum About forming a group - I feel like having made the suggestion now I should do something about it. It's not something I looked at previously, and up until now I've just been observing the goings-on at Loomio without really partaking in the activities, ie. I'm still getting used to this all. Also, I am not sure if I would be the best facilitator, because due to work commitments, I often just drop off the radar for weeks at a time. So if anyone else here would like to organize the group or if @richarddbartlett is willing to do so, that is fantastic. But if no one else wants to, I will look into it and try to get things going.

@roslyn I have @ mentioned @richarddbartlett and have also noticed that @matthewbartlett likes one or two posts here. I know they are both very busy working on developing the platform and may not have much time for participating in non-feature / bug / development ideas but I would be interested to get some feedback from the loomio folks.

I am planning to run as an Independent in the next Irish general election and hold at least one vote a month via internet voting for my constituents.

I can see a lot of the discussion would be politics-centric but also think we need somewhere for people like yourself who plan on running for election in order to promote the use of internet voting to share your thoughts, problems and requirements.

I am no political expert by any means but I do believe that lack of participation is not simply due to apathy on the part of the voters.

I have recently contacted a local (to me) group in the city of Durham pointing them towards this discussion after reading the Open Letter to Ed Milliband in the Local Politics section of their web site.

I have raised the weighted voting mechanism with the Loomio developers in the past and it is something they are aware of and looking at some stage in the future.

@alandavison
Cool, so maybe let's see what @richarddbartlett and @matthewbartlett come back with and maybe go from there?

Rome wasn't built in a day - what Loomio has now is great, and I am sure it will continue to develop and adjust as our experiences grow.

But yes, I think it would be great to have a group to discuss campaigns, the feedback the tool is getting, etc. in different parts of the world in specific relation to political use.

Hi folks! This is a fascinating and rich discussion. I've just caught up on the whole thing. Great to have practitioners involved who are trying things out in the real world.

Pia's talk was also wonderful. What a sparkling character! One thing that stood out for me was her comment:

we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debate should be, once again, one of its fundamental values.

That highlights one of the important things to me about Loomio – it's not just voting; it's deliberating — talking over things together and only then deciding. I hope Loomio will encourage better democracy partly by helping people learn to deliberate together.

But on the voting side some of you might be interested to read a couple of older conversations about vote delegation, or 'liquid democracy': here and here

Starting a new sub-group: I think it's a great idea. My own time is quite limited though. Within my 'Loomio hours' I'm presently focused on testing ways of letting people & groups support Loomio financially, and I can't commit to facilitating a new group. I could commit to support @roslyn or someone else to facilitate it though, if that would be of help. Whoever takes that on might like to check out these ideas & tips on group facilitation first.

@alandavison Yes, thank you for that. A little while ago, a few of us here enrolled in a MOOC on Voting Methods. Not sure any actually finished it as it quickly became quite info dense & complex.

It was also a little worrying to see how, even with small sample sizes, different vote count systems could produce entirely different outcomes. Each giving the 'right' answer, though often very different. How could a simple problem of collective choosing of a few possible options become so complex? The devious mathematics of opinion.

One notion we discussed was 'cumulative voting' (though didn't know it had a name, thanks). Especially where there were multiple options, distributing a pack of 10 tokens against preferred options provided a qualitative element of 'like' beyond just a binary, yes/no.

Presumably there would be some kind of relationship between number of options (& divisibility?) and the number of 'tokens'. eg.distributing 12 tokens between 3 options cf. 100 tokens between 10 options. A 120 tokens among 3 options probably unnecessary etc.

Also perhaps allows for the idea mentioned where those more directly affected by an issue are allocated a higher number of tokens to distribute. Still chewing that one over, though.

Thank you for raising this idea again.

Re @roslyn et al suggestion of a forum for such discussions. I'd also humbly go one further and suggest some form of wiki.

These discussions do terrible things to my browser tab count, as I rapidly accumulate many more open tabs, exploring the various ideas and links mentioned here. Inevitable, I end up with 100-200 tabs, which at some stage crash & get lost again. (Yeah, I know, Twingl/Trailblazer, working on that.)

It would be wonderful, with the access to the talent and experience of our respondents, to be able to capture the content of these discussions with an enriched form of cross-referenced archive, such as a wiki. So much great content being presented in these threads.

@jgrey fwiw I find instapaper effective for saving things to read later

@jgrey - Welcome to the discussion, I know what you mean about lots of tabs as I am another "open link in new tab" kind of person and have about 50 open tabs as I write this 8 of which are Loomio tabs.... throwing 8Gb RAM and a 32" monitor at it really helps :-)

Funny also how many of the things I have been looking at as a result of getting more involved in the community discussions since the release of 1.0 are interconnecting.

Watching the TED talks linked at the beginning of the post a couple of days after getting a "Chromecast" and testing that with TED as a feed channel to XBMC.

Finding out about MOOC courses, some of which may be of interest to people in this discussion. I will have a look for one on Voting Methods as well now ...

Looking into "collaborative documentation" in particular one that includes version control to highlight which changes were made, when and by whom. I will take a look at Wikis again but there was a reason I discounted them last time I was researching this I just can't remember why.

One thing I think would be useful would be a flowchart for those interested in running for election as well as boilerplate resources that could be modified and reused by different candidates, flyers, posters, html email templates ....

Another thing may be a "Technical Group" who could facilitate a candidates Internet presence. An online election campaign could be launched quickly with multiple social media, web and print resources. I mention this because I am working on this idea for a SocEnt project I want to launch.

Thanks to @matthewbartlett (the @ mention auto-complete is still not working) for offering to support whoever chooses to facilitate a new group, I will read the link you provided - I may even open it in another tab :-)

I have lots more ideas but don't want to side-track the current focus.

@alandavison MOOC was called Making Better Group Decisions: Voting, Judgement Aggregation and Fair Division

https://www.coursera.org/course/votingfairdiv

Great content, just quite dense, requiring more time than indicated on course guide.

Looking into “collaborative documentation” in particular one that includes version control to highlight which changes were made, when and by whom

@alandavison it sounds like we are thinking along the very same lines. This was also a goal of the project I was telling you about in the other thread.

A wiki is a good start, but my problem with any wiki that I've used (or looked into):

1. the "diff view" is almost never a primary concern, and is difficult to use, or doesn't expose the details you want easily
2. the comments/discussion are somewhat divorced from the final document. There's rarely a good way to link to the section under discussion. So if a person wants to answer the question "what is the discussion that lead to this paragraph?", they have to scan the entire discussion history.

I made a second attempt at something like this using git as the versioning system and sphinx for documentation. The project is unfortunately also not complete. The piece that is missing is again the frontend for commenting. Although I did at least start working on mockups

@jgrey - thanks I will look into that, my to-do list is rapidly expanding...

@dnephin - we do seem to have similar goals and research interests, thanks for the links I will check them out - more to-dos :-)

It was the git and github MOOC I started a couple of nights ago to see how techie the content was and how useful it would be for "collaborative documentation"

@dnephin - have you looked at any of the tools mentioned here

@alandavison I've used a couple of them (google docs and etherpad), and I'm familiar with some of the others.

I should mention that personally I feel that it must be open source (but it doesn't have to be free). I think that excludes almost that entire list from consideration (etherpad being the exception).

Without getting into all the details of why, I think it being open source is especially important when it comes to political use. Public organizations should not be restricted by proprietary software licenses. The public also needs to be able to audit these tools both for security and correctness.

I'll have to take another look at etherpad, it's been a while since I've used it.

I think most of these are geared toward word processing more than decision making. While these are potentially similar, I think the lack of focus on viewing diff history and commenting tends to show (they have similar issues to wikis).

I've used google docs a lot. I really like that you get to highlight the context and respond to a specific item. However, the commenting system is quite limited. You can't do much with formatting, and there is a pretty restrictive character limit. Once a comment is resolved it basically disappears, so it still doesn't solve the problem of being able to figure out why a paragraph is the way it is.

@dnephin +1 for an open source solution. I tend to look there first but also try to evaluate or check feature lists of proprietary stuff for comparison.

Difficult to check out collaborative tools without collaborating, how do you feel about "collaborative testing" Etherpad looks promising and also seems to have some interesting plugins such as live chat which could be useful. Perhaps we could test it together?

This discussion so far, since I made my one little contribution above, seems to me a good example of how confusing public discussions can get. Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions - and this is with most of us assuming that we have a shared underlying value system. And even though I can clearly recognize the goodwill of all contributions, I still find myself having emotionally charged reactions which influence and complicate my response. And am I If really understanding where everybody is coming from and am I just responding rationally and clearly to everybody’s point? Or is my response influenced by feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, dismissed, even if ever so slightly?
Why am I wanting to make certain points - is it really just for the benefit of the discussion or am I defending a position within myself?
We know how much of public internet discussion can get out of hand and become offputting at the drop of a hat - in community decision-making we cannot afford that; we need people to stick at it and stick it out even if it gets uncomfortable. And I want to be able and I want others to be able to not incite or escalate discussions, but to stay oriented towards the benefit of the larger whole.
to me this seems a pretty tall order, even in a group of like-minded people with a shared underlying value system. If on top of that entrenched or economically motivated polarised positions were to come into play, all kinds of spanners could be thrown into the works, to the point that the majority of members would just get fed up and get turned off.

If you read reflections on the Occupy movement after its decline (having experimented with basis democracy decision-making), the gist of it is that people were completely getting fed up with ‘process, process, process’ which was going nowhere.

My involvement with consensus decision-making started in 1970s grassroots politics and campaign and affinity groups in nonviolent direct action (peace movement, anti-nuclear, environmental, squatting, autonomous youth centres etc). I was involved for many years in a yearly European antimilitarist camp, where for two weeks in the summer we were trying to live basis democracy with between 500 and 1000 people. One of the things I learned and concluded profoundly disagrees with something that Roslyn said above:
"Also, as a bona fide expert, I will say that there is nothing mysterious out there that ‘the people’ are incapable of understanding. Most stuff just isn’t really that complicated."
Whilst I really understand where you're coming from in saying that, Roslyn, in practice the most simple decisions got completely mangled by a confusing and disenchanting group process, that left people feeling frustrated, and going off and doing their own thing. Up to a point this kind of 'anarcho-syndicalist' (as they called it in the olden days) attitude of everybody autonomously doing what they want as long as it doesn't interfere with and harm others is fine - not everything has to be decided together and we can delegate and let people get on with things. But in some ways that just avoids the issue of cooperation and the very real difficulties in making decisions that motivate people and engage people in a community building and consciousness raising process, where we learn to ENJOY basis democracy.

There is a tendency for software developers to get lost in software technicalities, and for lawyers to get lost in legal technicalities, when at some point we need to design for and take into account difficulties of human communication - and in my experience and in my opinion that really does get complicated (even if in logical principle it shouldn’t).

A sophisticated culture of engaged citizens in a future basis democracy would not tackle all decisions with the same procedure or same structure. Not all decisions are the same, and they do not all require the same levels or degrees of agreement.
What we came to 30-odd years ago was a distinction of three levels of decisions involved in EVERY decision-making process:

1) a rational task/goal level, underpinned by:
2) an emotional-relational level, and both of those framed by:
3) a procedural-structural level
One of the difficulties in many approaches to decision-making is the assumption (also very common in economics) that we are all functioning like rational computers evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of a particular proposal. This ignores the problem that each and any decision we can think of means different things to different people, and has diverse emotional significances.

When somebody above talked about the 'deliberating' part of decision-making (which is where we understand each other ever more deeply through decision-making in the context of the community), that speaks to me of the emotional-relation level that can and usually does get triggered in the decision-making process (where being understood by others within the decision-making process is just as important as the final decision we end up with).

As soon as we take those first two levels of every decision into account (what is usually called the content and the process aspects), we realise that people have very divergent assumptions as to how these aspects should be managed procedurally: one of the simplest polarisations that arises is between one faction who try to restrict the discussion only to rational considerations as valid contributions versus another faction who insist on the emotional dimensions which usually complicate things (sometimes this faction just withdraws because they feel dominated and structurally excluded by the rational faction). Immediately, you lose the engagement of about half the community.
So if I don't want that to happen, it seems to me that the discussion needs to be supported and facilitated. It needs to be supported on the rational level by facilitative awareness of the different topics and threads and side arguments - a group function which in a forum such as this might be called 'moderating the discussion' (although I don't like the word ‘moderate’). But secondly, it needs to be facilitated on the emotional level, and thirdly it needs to be facilitated in terms of balancing the rational and the emotional level.
All of this becomes so much more important when there are pre-existing factions entering the discussion, where things are heated already, and different value systems operate, with little empathy or patience for others.

Ultimately, it seems to me, for basis democracy to work, we need a cultural revolution in facilitative awareness, in each of us and in the community and communities as a whole.

Closing tax loopholes, as Roslyn was suggesting as an example, seems a straightforward no-brainer and a simple, legal rational decision, if only a rational majority can get behind it. But it is not just that people's minds are brainwashed or that people are paid to vote against it that stops this no-brainer from being adopted as a majority vote.

If we have these three levels of decision-making (rational, emotional, procedural), power-over and domination occurs on ALL three of them, but in some ways the procedural is the most significant. Who gets to structure and facilitate the decision-making process?
As somebody commented above: there is decisive power inherent in who gets to FRAME the decisions and the decision-making process?

In my opinion, we do not just want to democratise the rational level of decision-making, but ALL three levels.
What typically happens in representative democracy is that the procedural level of decision-making gets dominated by people least suited to that job: they are psychologically programmed to be incapable of consultation. It seems to me, in basis democracy we want a system where EVERYBODY in the community becomes procedurally and emotionally competent, not just rationally informed to then participate in the practical voting.

One conclusion from all this to me is that different decisions require an organic emergence of procedures suited to each particular decision (as extreme examples off the top of my head: a decision about abortion requires a very different procedure from traffic planning).

Yes, whatever the topic, we can involve and consult experts in the relevant field to contribute, but ultimately everybody's rational, moral, emotional and procedural intelligences need to continue developing and contributing. I think we do not want a one-size-fits-all legal or software structure, which will be perfectly suited for some decisions, and completely inappropriate for others. We want an adaptable, nimble and organically emergent structure and procedure, where everybody in the community can make contributions on all three levels: rational, emotional and procedural. But in order for this not to become a quagmire of confusion, we need to distinguish not only different rational topics and threads of each contribution, but also these three levels. It needs some of us to keep an eye on all these procedural issues, as separate from the content of the discussion.
In the discussion above, for example, the idea to start a new group to be separated out from this discussion would fall into the category of a procedural intervention.
Roslyn's highly relevant point about people obstructing, distracting and blocking in my view is not just relevant to the question of 50-50 versus other percentages, but is a much wider and deeper issue about procedural confusions, driven by emotional agendas, disguised as rational interventions - which is something that doesn't just have happen in rotten political systems, but also happened in basic democratic groups of 500 people who shared a fairly similar value system (as in the antimilitarist camps I mentioned above).

And none of the above even begins to address the additional difficulty, that most politically or socially relevant decisions consist of a whole complex web of hierarchically nested sub-decisions, which interlink and are interdependent. Each level of such a complex hierarchy of decisions might require different procedures and different levels of agreement: some might require consensus, some of them might be OK to be voted upon, and some of them we can just let autonomous groups get on with.

But for such complex decision-making processes not to become a swamp of interminable aggravating polarised and exhausting 'process process process' and endless squabbling, it seems to me, we need to develop a basis democratic intelligence - a whole new skill set of making 'power-with' decisions, instead of 'power-over' decisions.
Unless we take those complications into account NOW (which - in reference to an earlier question - are not based on mistrust in humanity, but on a passion for and trust in humanity's potential which, however, is not idealistic and unrealistic in terms of our current starting point), it will be much more difficult later, once we try to scale up these systems to include larger communities and more people. Why not learn from and build on these experiences that I am referring to (which were like utopian experiments in basis democracy)?

@michaelsoth - very impressive piece of writing and certainly food for a lot of thought.

Ultimately, it seems to me, for basis democracy to work, we need a cultural revolution in facilitative awareness, in each of us and in the community and communities as a whole.

This is something I was about to start looking at in more detail. Have you read the link provided by @matthewbartlett

Whoever takes that on might like to check out these ideas & tips on group facilitation first.

I must admit I haven't yet but will push that up my to-do list having read your post. On the subject of your post I will have to read it a few times and try and follow up on some of the points you have raised.

@matthewbartlett - copying quote text that includes links looses the link information I had to edit the post and recreate the link.

@lbjoum @roslyn
“Let me leave you with a much deeper philosophical question. Would the decisions made by the total population reflect the nature of humanity and if so… is that nature a good thing? Do you have faith in humanity? I have chosen to trust us, while realising that if I am wrong then there is not much point anyway.”
“But despite all of that, I absolutely agree with @joum - I’ve decided to trust in humanity, too. There actually aren’t any other options. 
After all, trusting in a few self-selecting, born-and-raised elite individuals hasn’t, oddly enough, worked out very well for most of us.”

Dear Joum & Roslyn,
I think this point is profound and deserves a proper answer. On a straightforward, common sense level I would say: like in a relationship with one person, I think it is unhelpful to think of trust as an on-off switch. It’s not either there or not there at all. It is not an all-or-nothing binary. It's a complex, shifting, dynamic process - it's not a given - it's something to be grown and developed through commitment.

I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life working as a psychologist and psychotherapist, really trying to understand the inner world of human that reflects the – what shall I say? - outer fuck-up of Western civilisation. When I was referring to mob rule, I wasn’t using that expression lightly. There are very different levels of consciousness operating on the planet and not everybody is subscribing to a tolerant, democratic value system. Remember, in 1933 Hitler got elected democratically.
In the world of psychotherapy your profound philosophical question is reflected in a polarisation between what’s called Freud’s psychoanalytic pessimism (one of the main books expressing this being “Civilisation and its Discontents”) versus post-1960’s humanistic optimism. I am very much a child of humanistic ideals, and so in principle both my heart and my head are with you in having faith in the goodness of humanity. But this idealism has been tempered with experience by realism about the shadow aspects of human behaviour, which is also deeply entrenched and which am trying to tackle in myself and in the people I work with every day. And one of the fundamental questions is: how amenable are these shadow aspects to change and transformation? You can take that question all the way down into modern neuroscience where they talk about ingrained pattern versus neuro-plasticity: once developmentally established, can human patterns of perceiving/ thinking/feeling/behaving/relating change through the life cycle? And is this change superficial and cosmetic, or deep and structural?
Personally, I think in the field of psychology (a field which in many respects is fairly self-absorbed, individualistic and plugged into a normative and addictive consumerism, a faddish worship of narcissistic self-improvement - aspects which run counter to any kind of basis democracy idealism), I’m at the socio-politically-ecologically engaged cutting edge, and if anybody is interested, I am more than happy to give further pointers and references.
In summary: it is precisely because I continue to have faith and trust in the human potential for cooperation and community that I want to be realistic in tackling the real shadow aspects which in my experience are likely to scupper that potential manifesting. To me that’s not a question of an ideological position - like a categorical trust versus a categorical cynicism. It’s a question of being psychologically smart in recognising the very real established forces and power structures which are standing in our way and will oppose us, both externally/outside but also within/inside the ‘people’ (what the Occupy movement calls “us, the 99%”).

@michaelsoth you said

Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions - and this is with most of us assuming that we have a shared underlying value system.

This is why I have been involved in some other group discussions about Loomio feature ideas. This discussion topic is a prime example of what shouldn't be happening on Loomio, or how the platform needs to adapt to address the issues we are highlighting.

I think that is what I was trying to get at in an earlier post

I don't see "representation through consultation" as a replacement for the current system (at least not until the sorts of issues outlined here can be discussed, ratified and implemented which is going to take time and collaborative development by groups such as Loomio and Democracy.os)

At present we need to either adapt the way we post or test something different in order to address the issues you highlighted.

@michaelsoth you said

And even though I can clearly recognize the goodwill of all contributions, I still find myself having emotionally charged reactions which influence and complicate my response.

I think we are all guilty of "emotionally charged reactions" and certainly for the reasons you go on to detail. To me that seems to be a natural or human response to the conditions you highlighted.

Or is my response influenced by feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, dismissed, even if ever so slightly.

I know one of my responses earlier in the post was based on a misunderstanding, I had been jumping backwards and forwards across posts and discussions, I was tired and to a certain extent getting carried away with the influx of activity following the 1.0 release. Fortunately @gregorycassel didn't escalate the misunderstanding but clarified his position and lead to my apology and self-analysis of why I made the mistake in the first place.

@michaelsoth - Tiredness and lack of focus lead to my response, but I also think that the inability to correctly read emotion / meaning / intent in a text based exchange is partly responsible.

I still see Loomio as a tool more geared towards discussion than consensus. It will have to be adapted or developed to be more acceptable for political purposes.

Someone, I think @michaelsoth mentioned different parts of a decision that included goals. It's something I would love to see included in the decision making process here with Loomio. It's got the potential but currently reminds me more of an Occupy GA than a tool that can help us refine that process.

@BenBurton I don't think the tool you are looking for exists (yet) if I does I certainly haven't found it.

Did you see the OpenMind screenshots with the "weighted voting" or "cumulative voting" that I posted earlier?

Can you suggest what needs to be added to Loomio or changed? What can we do in the meantime until the tool you want does exist?

I did @alandavison . Not sure how they relate in all honesty as I don't know the context of what it is.

As for suggestions, I started a discussion on Loomio's definition of a decision. I know what a decision is to ME, but it would be nice to get a group discussion on that. If we come to consensus on what that is, we can generate requirements for this (or any other) tool.

@matthewbartlett regarding your reference to: https://www.loomio.org/d/Jg6uoZmT/tips-for-loomio-coordinators

I think this is a good start for coordinators/moderators/facilitators. But when I have a bit more headspace, I think I might apply my experience of actual group facilitation over the last 35 years to develop this further. In my opinion, this is one of the main areas that will need a lot of further development and thinking once we start scaling up Loomio for bigger groups and communities. As I have proposed in other comments, my hunch is that this is one of the main stumbling blocks and linchpins as to how effective and efficient the collective process can become.

@BenBurton the way Loomio currently works is that a discussion, often containing very lengthy posts that as @michaelsoth pointed out contain

Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions

If it were possible to split the content of a post, by sentence or paragraph into something that could be "categorized" by the person posting or other group members in some way as to indicate how they feel it relates to the discussion.

• supports / adds to / positive ...
• detracts / takes away from / negative ..
• confuses / not helpful / misleading / ...
• other ...

At the moment "liking" a post, especially if it is a long one doesn't really highlight the parts of the post I feel are most important (to the discussion) or (to me personally).

There is no way to see which points lead to a proposal or decision and which argued against it or lead to other discussion topics being spawned.

The OpenMind example was one where there may be multiple ideas, or opinions or points that could be voted on as separate entities and each member could split say 10 votes, 4,3,2,1 or 3,3,2,1,1 for example using a "block" to indicate which is most important to them.

The item with the most votes would float to the top of the list.

Ideally this would be in a different topic and I have mentioned it elsewhere but include it here so others are aware why I have raised it.

@alandavison

Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions - and this is with most of us assuming that we have a shared underlying value system.
This is why I have been involved in some other group discussions about Loomio feature ideas. This discussion topic is a prime example of what shouldn’t be happening on Loomio, or how the platform needs to adapt to address the issues we are highlighting.

I have no idea how to tackle these things that "shouldn't be happening" in terms of the software systems. But I can think about the equivalent in actual group meetings: there is a famous feminist paper from the 1980s, I think, called “The tyranny of structurelessness”. The upshot of that is: in the pursuit of equality and the avoidance of any kind of thing resembling ‘bad’ authority, leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere, which becomes dominated by confusion and emotional distress. In order for the leadership vacuum not to degenerate into this atmosphere, I think the paper suggests ‘rotating facilitation’, i.e. different people taking facilitative responsibilities at different times, so as to avoid concentrating the facilitative position in one person and thus being monopolised. So the paper argues for a kind of deliberate and sensitive and collectively agreed delegation of facilitative functions which people take in turn (or what in online discussion we might call ‘moderation’).
One side issue relevant to this is the recognition that different people have special expertise in different kinds of such leadership: there are skilled technical facilitators, emotional facilitators, procedural facilitators, and many others (the seminal book from decades ago was called “Six category Intervention” by John Heron; he later wrote one of the best books available on group facilitation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Facilitators-Handbook-1/dp/0749427981/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1417920691&sr=8-2&keywords=john+heron+facilitation).

A comprehensive decision-making process needs many kinds of contributions in order to have a wholesome inclusive atmosphere, but in order to avoid confusion, there needs to be AWARENESS of the different levels and logical orders of those contributions. There needs to be self-reflective awareness of how and on what level I am making a contribution. And if I lack that self-reflectiveness, I might need somebody else to take such a facilitative position to help me with that, and make my intention explicit, so my contribution becomes validated and is received by the community. As I mentioned in my earlier comment: if by default we assume that ALL contributions are only on the rational factual content level of proposals (furthering the decision-making process only on the level of ideas and opinions), we invalidate the diversity of possible contributions and their validity and most of them will be ignored, fall by the wayside and then later come back surreptitiously to block and interfere.

So in the same way that there is a structure for agree, abstain, disagree, block, we might want to structure into the whole system a recognition of the different kinds and levels of contributions, on the most basic level (following my earlier comment) based on a distinction between rational, emotional and procedural contributions.

But my guess is that on top of that (i.e. the self-awareness of each contributor as to what kind of contribution they are making at any point in time), we really do need experienced moderators/facilitators who are skilled at helping people sift out and differentiate those different aspects of their comments. In the same way that groups meeting face-to-face require facilitation in order to not degenerate into the tyranny of structurelessness, I think online discussions and decision-making processes need the same thing (at least as a function that gets temporarily delegated, ideally to someone who is actually skilled at fulfilling that function).

So we need a facilitative function to keep track of the rational level, by following the flow of ideas, opinions, proposals and how they link and relate to each other. But we also need a facilitative function attending to the flow of emotional exchange, even if not explicit (what in the olden days used to be called a ‘vibes watcher’). And we need a facilitative function on the procedural level, too ( and I could write a whole paper just on that topic).
But I guess you get the general gist of what I’m trying to say for now.

What you're getting at @alandavison is fairly critical. Isolating issues that are of a manageable size so an effective discussion is even possible. I think Loomio can get there.

You mention "Multiple issues and multiple threads going in different directions".

That could be a very useful and telling discussion thread here on Loomio. To me, the solution lies in Loomio enabling users to isolate an issue (like we have) and turn that into its own discussion working towards consensus on the solution.

@BenBurton , @michaelsoth I think some very pertinent points have been raised that are not directly related to "Political use for Loomio" but are contributing factors for any distributed collaborative decision making process or tool.

• Group structure and Dynamics
• Facilitation and Moderation
• Decision Making

All of which are important and unfortunately inter-related. So my question is this :

How do we define boundaries and prevent the "Discussion Goal" becoming fragmented and disjointed?

@alandavison

And even though I can clearly recognize the goodwill of all contributions, I still find myself having emotionally charged reactions which influence and complicate my response.

I think we are all guilty of “emotionally charged reactions” and certainly for the reasons you go on to detail. To me that seems to be a natural or human response to the conditions you highlighted.

The attitude and recognition I am trying to get to is one that does, of course, accept such “natural human responses”, but goes beyond the sense that we are “guilty” of “emotionally charged reactions” - building on the recognition that the ‘personal is political’ ( and vice versa), what I’m proposing is that it is essential to any collective decision-making process that works sustainably well that we actively validate and integrate the emotional level as a necessary ingredient in the process. So rather than any of us feeling guilty about disturbing the otherwise rational decision-making process with extraneous emotionally charged reactions, I am proposing we find an attitude that doesn’t segregate out the emotional component, but makes it foundational. Whether we emphasise the deliberating (Matthew’s term) aspects, the consultative or actual voting aspects of decision-making, to me they ALL have an emotional foundation, which can be pro-actively integrated ( that is what I do when I facilitate groups face-to-face). As I mentioned earlier, when we think about the deliberating aspect of any kind of discussion that Loomio tries to provide a platform for, it’s essentially about people learning to understand each other, and what each of the discussed topics actually means to them and how they are significant. It’s the mutual recognition not just of your rational opinion or proposal, but of who you are and why it matters to you. Otherwise, we might as well have AI talking to each other.

So rather than seeing emotional contributions as an interference or distraction from the discussion, I’m trying to integrate the emotional-relational, as long as it is recognized as such. What is confusing is if people parade an emotional investment as an opinion; or if they dig their heels in without making their emotional investment explicit; or if they thrall procedurals spanners in the works because they feel misunderstood or triggered by somebody. It is that confusion of levels which wreaks additional havoc (on top of the difficulty that people have opposing feelings, beliefs and investments). So rather than pretending that we can all monitor and regulate that internally, each of us individually being responsible for filtering out any emotional response so it doesn’t disturb the discussion, I’d rather make an explicit space for it, so it can be validated and acknowledged for what it is without being hidden or dominating.

@michaelsoth you said

leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere

Is that what is happening here or are we still in the group "Storming stage"?

@alandavison

leaderless groups create a kind of free-for-all atmosphere
Is that what is happening here or are we still in the group “Storming stage”?

I'm not sure, you see - I'm mainly having a discussion with you - I've lost awareness of the group. I hope people find it relevant, but I think I need facilitating (quite apart from the fact that here it's 3:40 in the morning and somebody needs to send me to bed!). Good night for now ....

@michaelsoth - well at least we are in the same timezone, goodnight and thanks for your enlightening input this evening/early morning.

How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?

@alandavison Consensus on the goal has to be reached before a targeted discussion can take place. And in order to reach consensus on a goal, a community needs to reach consensus on the problem that exists and needs to be fixed.

@BenBurton the original discussion heading includes

I’ve been watching the development interested in its possibilities to political use. As far as I see, Loomio will allow us to do this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era

We can increase society participation in government decisions and/or poltical parties.
What do you think about it?

I had to go back and read it again, having done so I don't think the majority of points raised are off-topic. The posts after all reflect the groups thoughts - the things we think are important when considering scaling up to deal with non-trivial decision making and voting.

@roslyn and @joaomarcelloortega want to run for election in order to give their constituents a say in the way she/he votes (on their behalf) as their representative. Or that is how I understand it currently. Their job (and that of their team of supporters / aids / etc.) will be to communicate the legislation or proposal in language that is accessible to everybody and then rely on a secure, distributed, mobile accessible platform to promote and collect constituent opinion.

Would this be a fair summary of the first part of the posted requirement?

increase society participation in government decisions

So one goal is :

increase society participation in government decisions

And Loomio is one possible solution, Democracy.os or www.votenaweb.com.br / other voting platform would be others?

@alandavison A discussion could easily be started on that topic. It would probably be fruitful.

@BenBurton

I still see Loomio as a tool more geared towards discussion than consensus.

Me too. A great place for this discussion.

increase society participation in government decisions
I like that. But the group would be discussing methods and implications so why not:

Methods and Implications of increasing societal participation in government decisions.

@michaelsoth Your thought on the choice to trust is most interesting and a pleasure to read. I love philosophical thoughts and conversations.
I have not investigated the depths of the mechanisms of human trust, and you point out that there is a lot to think about there.

Let me leave you with a much deeper philosophical question. Would the decisions made by the total population reflect the nature of humanity and if so… is that nature a good thing? Do you have faith in humanity? I have chosen to trust us, while realising that if I am wrong then there is not much point anyway.

I agree, I used trust in a digital manner in my question/statement. I have never really thought of trust as a spectrum. To me it is: do I trust?, don't I trust?, or not sure if I trust. In relation to my choice to trust humanity, I did weight my feelings about the different aspects of human nature. The result was a newly formed internal feeling about what the spirit of humanity is. Previous to asking myself the 'faith in humanity' question, my held feeling was that I thought we are destined to destroy ourselves. I still think that this is possible, and it is largely because I know there are 'shadow aspects' that need to be brought to light and recognised as something we need to change.

I want to be realistic in tackling the real shadow aspects which in my experience are likely to scupper that potential manifesting.

I had to look up the word "scupper" and found references to boat deck drain holes, sinking a ship deliberately, and thwarting.

We have the potential to evolve. I have evolved in my life time. I have grown to understand that I am part of a species that must learn, fast, to understand the power our species has over the destiny of Earth. We have never had as much reason to monitor our impact and reduce it greatly before we destroy the place that has nurtured our evolution.

Deeply, Philosophically, I realise that nature / the universe / reality, does not have an opinion on what the outcome is. Within the boundaries of our ability we are free to create and destroy - and I love that this is so. Sometimes when we create, we also destroy, without realising. What a challenging world!

the shadow aspects of human behaviour
how amenable are these shadow aspects to change and transformation?

I pin a lot of hope on the possibility that when a person realises their actions will lead to the end of our success as a species, I believe that the human/person will change to avoid that happening. I hope this is true, because this is, to me, the driving reason that I have faith in us recognising and adjusting our shadows, and evolving our society.

It’s a question of being psychologically smart in recognising the very real established forces and power structures which are standing in our way and will oppose us

The systems of society are established by those who have the power to write them. In western democracies 99% of the population have a very limited ability to influence the writing of the rule books of the systems that we are compelled to operate within. I don't think that the people who do have this ability are evil, but I think it is not in their interest to make the rules equal; which is not a fair game.

Because we are forced to play by the rules it is only reasonable that we should have a say in the process. Having this ability will be a responsibility that most of us have not experienced before.

Global Direct Democracy will become a reality - The means has been identified, and the mechanisms are being built. It is a matter of when not if. I believe that giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability. Time will not show what our one true nature is because we are free to be many things. Time will show what we chose to be.

@lbjoum

Global Direct Democracy will become a reality - The means has been identified, and the mechanisms are being built. It is a matter of when not if. I believe that giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability. Time will not show what our one true nature is because we are free to be many things. Time will show what we chose to be.

Yes, yes, yes - and if we want to make that happen, let's learn from the history of those events and movements that had the same ideals (and for me that includes how they were naive, how they failed, how they were sabotaged and how they were 'scuppered' - that word again!). I am thinking of the French Revolution, the German 'Räterepublik' in 1918, the Spanish Revolution in the civil war, Nicaragua, Cuba, the kind of utopian experiments I was talking about as part of the grassroots politics in the 1980's, the Occupy movement, etc etc.

giving every person a say in their governance will show our true nature and ability
I think there is some truth in that, but even your formulation: "giving" them a say is problematic. They need to 'have' their say by 'taking' it, not being 'given' it. it is precisely the implicit issues of power and leadership, (and people like us assuming that the rest of the population will perceive, operate and behave just like us in terms of sharing and contributing), which have historically scuppered things. It's people like us being psychologically naive, and not being prepared, skilled and ready when they do get into a position of leadership, that will sabotage things.
Those people who will want to use Loomio to stand for election, in my view, will not just be faced with the task of translating the legal and political issues into accessible language and opening them up for consultation. That will be the least of it is - anybody with a brain and a commitment to community can do that. And as @roslyn said: none of these issues are that complicated and we need to trust the people.
To me those ideas and sentiments are naive, I'm sorry to say.
From being involved in consensus decision-making in grassroots politics and in group facilitation and depth psychology and in teaching facilitators and organisational consultants for the last 30 years, it seems to me that a whole range of other skills will become much more important: the people who stand for election, in wanting to consult the people they will get elected to represent, in order to make that work will need to function like facilitators to their community - they will need the psychological, emotional, and other leadership skills including systemic awareness to address the underlying relationship and group dynamic issues, which are at the root of why rational decision-making goes wrong.
As soon as you get elected as a leader, people will transfer power to you, in very irrational and emotionally immature ways. The same thing happens in therapy, and is called transference. People project things onto you, which means they start to misread your good intentions. Dealing wisely and compassionately with such projection is one of the key leadership skills, that goes way beyond translating the political issues into accessible language. That is the kind of thing I'm talking about which we need to prepare ourselves for.
In my experience, when you 'give' people power and let them or encourage them to have their say, all kinds of past distress comes up, from all their previous life experience where they have been oppressed, imposed upon and disempowered. In that moment, all your best intentions and ideals as a leader/ facilitator run into some very real emotional difficulties. That is another kind of thing I'm talking about which we need to prepare ourselves for.
Does that make any sense?

Love reading through this discussion, so many interesting perspectives.

I'm a member of Senator Online (senatoronline.org.au). We're an Australian based political party founded upon the concept of direct democracy. I'm currently working on creating a support network for pro-direct democracy organizations, whether they be web developers, advocacy groups or political parties.

If anyone is a part of an organization or knows one please '@' mention me.

I'm currently just organizing the list from google docs but Loomio might make a good platfrom when the network is up and running.

@michaelsoth - the "markdown" takes a little getting used to but if you place a space after the ">" symbol the text you are quoting will be formatted as a quote.

I mention this because when re-reading this topic the posts with quotes stand out more than those without and highlight points or phrases other members feel are important to the discussion.

Etherpad looks promising ... Perhaps we could test it together?

@alandavison sounds good, I'd be up for that

@michaelsoth you wrote :

when we think about the deliberating aspect of any kind of discussion that Loomio tries to provide a platform for, it’s essentially about people learning to understand each other, and what each of the discussed topics actually means to them and how they are significant.

I have argued a similar point in discussions about the "User Profile" being extended to include contact information and activity feeds interluding posts, proposals and current positions.

Rather than direct you all to another discussion (I would if I could link to the comment directly but right now I can only link to the whole topic) I will include a mobile screen mockup here.

Thanks for tagging me in here - phewf what a lot of rich discussion!

For what it's worth, the only politics I'm really interested in is the local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest. So that's the bias I bring to the design of Loomio, but I'm just one voice of many.

Having referenced the point @michaelsoth made about understanding each other I would now suggest that perhaps a bio section for each user (non compulsory) might also be useful.

In forum based discussions many users include a "signature" that is supposed to tell you a little bit about that person, a funny quote, play on words or piece of "shared wisdom".

Perhaps when joining a discussion group it would be good to add a short "information slug" to fill in some of details about other members. A summary of :

• what the discussed topics actually means to them
• how the topic is significant or important to them.

This wouldn't appear in the discussion like a forum signature but could be quickly referenced by clicking on the members initials or photo avatar, leading to a screen similar to the one above. Perhaps this information could replace the "Comments" section with some other heading (to be decided) and an extra tab for "Posts" could be added.

@richarddbartlett you wrote :

For what it’s worth, the only politics I’m really interested in is the local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest. So that’s the bias I bring to the design of Loomio, but I’m just one voice of many.

That in itself would be a good example of what I was referring to in relation to the points I raised in the post above this one.

PS - The reasons you stated are very close to the motivations I had for looking for something like Loomio in the first place. I'm not sure I am against private interest I would have to learn more about what you mean by that.

The 'private interest' bit is just me being a dirty radical, more of a hunch than a manifesto: I think we're fancy monkeys born in to an abundant commonwealth as interconnected equals with infinite potential, and we get ourselves into a lot of trouble when we pretend that one monkey can own a bit of it to the exclusion of all the other monkeys.

We should get a beverage sometime and talk about this at length, but right now I've got work to do for the commons :)

@dnephin - this discussion is growing faster than any other with some very important concepts being raised. I propose we create a discussion group to discuss "Towards a Collaborative Toolkit" including but not limited to Etherpad, rather than dilute this topic.

I have some ideas for addressing some of the things we have previously highlighted and some concerns about the limitations of the mobile platform.

@rorytb I had a quick look at your Loomio groups for SOL having read the earlier post by @lbjoum highlighting the difficulty you are having trying to delete unused sub-groups on Loomio. I scanned some of the group content but haven't had the time to look very closely yet.

I have also taken a look at the SOL web site and will look at it in greater detail this week.

I have a slight concern about Stage 2 of your technology plan :

Wiki for the public to collaboratively develop and vote on Bills for submission to Parliament

I would replace the word "wiki" with something more open like "online tool" or "online workspace" there will be more to follow on this subject.

@michaelsoth - you said ..

Those people who will want to use Loomio to stand for election, in my view, will not just be faced with the task of translating the legal and political issues into accessible language and opening them up for consultation. That will be the least of it is - anybody with a brain and a commitment to community can do that.

I think that is the initial point being made at the beginning of this discussion. A starting point, you might say, for reducing the barriers to participation for the majority of the people they represent.

We are all pretty much in agreement that "large group collaboration and decision making" is a very complex issue when looking at it in it's entirety.

Breaking it down into manageable, deliverable pieces whilst developing strategies to encourage engagement and participation is the best way I can see to tackle the problem.

As has already been highlighted not everybody will adopt the "new tools of democracy" but we still need to drop that pebble in the pond to observe the ripples...

You said in an earlier post

If you read reflections on the Occupy movement after its decline (having experimented with basis democracy decision-making), the gist of it is that people were completely getting fed up with ‘process, process, process’ which was going nowhere.

I guess that is what we are trying to address now...

There are already several comments about the depth and richness of this discussion, as it gets longer it becomes more daunting to new participants who have to set aside a fair amount of time to read and digest before being able to add to the debate.

During the course of discussion I would like to see members highlight topics that are of particular importance. I made an attempt earlier but that is only my perspective, floated to introduce the question posted earlier.

How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?

@alandavison

How do we define boundaries and prevent the “Discussion Goal” becoming fragmented and disjointed?

As it's late again, I'm sorry I haven't got time for one of my long-winded answers ...
The short and simple answer from my side is (as per earlier comments I made here and there): moderation and facilitation.
A moderator, in this kind of context, would in my view fulfil some of the functions that you are taking care of implicitly and in some ways are volunteering for: on the rational ideas and opinion level, somebody who has read the whole lengthy discussion can be delegated to summarise the main points, the pros and cons, and suggests subdividing the discussion, creating further lines of enquiry to be separated out - that kind of thing. the whole discussion is still there for anybody to go over and check whether the moderator has done their job in an inclusive and representative way. But most people would not want to wade through the whole thing - it is visible how and when the moderator is acting in the best interests of furthering the discussion and keeping it creative and productive.
What I was suggesting earlier is that in parallel to the flow of rational interaction, there is a flow of emotional interaction, which could be included explicitly, validly, which might require also facilitation of a different kind.

Some of these facilitative tasks and functions you have taken on in this discussion.I would happily leave it at the moderators discretion to make proposals how to support and further the discussion, and to decide what is confusing fragmentation and what is still creative brainstorming and diversity - but all we are talking about on that level is really a clustering or subdividing of topics, which are still all accessible to everybody.
Earlier on, you proposed the following subdivision:

Group structure and Dynamics
Facilitation and Moderation
Decision Making

Separating out those three topics from the current discussion makes some sense to me, although we would have to define more clearly the third point.
We could then get much more deeply into each of those points.
In this particular discussion, I would prefer to define one-sub-topic more precisely:
What can we learn from the tradition of actual face-to-face group facilitation, and what of that and be usefully applied to Loomio ( or more specifically: to Loomio in a political context)?
I could then contribute and summarise key learning points, references and books from my particular area of expertise without boring everybody to death in this wider discussion. And you could all have a go at cherry-picking and extracting from that what you want to use for Loomio, or for other software platforms that are maybe more suited to scaled-up political decision-making processes (taking into account what Richard said above re his focus for Loomio: "local, personal, affective, voluntary collaboration of small groups of people in pursuit of tangible, immediate gains for the common good and against private interest").

Gotta go horizontal - goodnight ...

@michaelsoth - thanks as always for your insight and goodnight...

@alan

We are all pretty much in agreement that “large group collaboration and decision making” is a very complex issue when looking at it in it’s entirety.

Breaking it down into manageable, deliverable pieces whilst developing strategies to encourage engagement and participation is the best way I can see to tackle the problem.

For a point of reference, Wikipedia excels at this.

@BenBurton - funny you should mention that, as I type I am on the Wikipedia Loomio page :-)

^ @alandavison

@BenBurton - they are running their fundraising banner and I am planning on donating the £3 they are asking for.

The short and simple answer from my side is moderation and facilitation.

I am a bit sceptical that this can really scale.

While wikipedia is an excellent example of this working at scale, the nature of wiki pages are quite different. At any give time some percentage of the pages on wikipedia will be wrong. In the case of wikipedia this is fine because (hopefully) no one is making critical decisions based solely on a wikipedia article, and eventually those pages will be corrected.

There are other types of discussions that can't change as quickly (simply because they may take years to carry out), and are more constrained to a fixed timeframe.

Not to mention that wikipedia has had it's own share of scandals with moderators being paid for content. This type of bribery would likely be more common in a system tasked with important decisions.

Even a moderator acting with good intentions has bias, which can bias the overall discussion. I think we should be aiming to avoid these types of centralized human intervention.

My feeling is that the software tool should handle these concerns. I think that can be accomplished by moving away from a single chronologically ordered list of responses, to a tree structure.

Discussions can branch freely without requiring extra effort on the participants. As a participant you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the branches you're interested in. A new participant joining the discussion only needs to follow the branches they're interested in, which would be a small fraction of the entire discussion. This makes auditing a lot easier as well (for the same reason, it's easier to find the related posts).

@dnephin - I like nested structures but without a good search function they can hide a lot of important information don't you think. Also it would be important to be able to link between trees to avoid duplicating and diluting comments.

I see real problems for a mobile centric interface.

PS - Just started testing etherpad tonight

Wikipedia fixes itself though. And the key analogy isn't if Wikipedia is perfect or not. The key is that the site narrows down a discussion to individual, digestible pieces to prevent completely off topic and out of range pages.

@daniel-nephin

@BenBurton - I don't think that @ mention is going to work try @denephin (which by the way doesn't auto-fill in 1.0. I will go over and test that using Beta next time.

@BenBurton - yes the auto-fill still works in Beta.

@dnephin & @BenBurton - here is a link to the collaborative tools testing sign up form

Even a moderator acting with good intentions has bias, which can bias the overall discussion. I think we should be aiming to avoid these types of centralized human intervention.

I agree very much @dnephin . It's such a difficult problem, and also a crucially important problem IMO.

I like the idea of a facilitator who has a certain amount of responsibility, based on community trust, but as little personal authority as possible.

Just 'pinning a post' is a way of shaping a group's interactions. I don't mean that it's wrong. I do mean that it's a concentration of personal power.

I would personally prefer groups in which facilitators/coordinators/admins have the authority to make time-sensitive decisions as needed, but always subject to community review.
(Which is awkward when it comes to deleted content!)

@gregorycassel I am going to try and test out some of the theories and suggestions presented here with respect to "facilitating" this discussion based on the suggestions made so far by @michaelsoth who has so much real-world experience in this field that the points he is raising can't be ignored.

I will try and select some of the "important" points raised so far in order to create a summary. Something we can focus on whilst keeping the general debate going in it's current format which feels a bit like brainstorming.

Initially these will be listed simply in chronological order as I work down the discussion trying to highlight specific things that have caused concern, highlighted issues or indicate topics that deserve better understanding through focused discussion.

I don't want to create or force that focus simply try to give us something we can move towards a proposal, whatever that might be (currently I have no idea)

Back to the topic of creating a group where we can continue to explore this topic. I think it would be best to have a parent group for general discussions and subgroups for more specific conversations. Like a sub-group to discuss the various existing platforms and their pro's and cons.

Because our SOL - Online Direct Democracy Australia has been dormant I have asked that group of people if they would mind us moving in there.
I will see what they say, and if no one objects I will change its name, but we still need to decide what to call it.

1. increase society participation in government decisions

2. Methods and Implications of increasing societal participation in government decisions.

3. Global working group.

More????

@lbjoum
It seems like this discussion is currently our "Global working group" or at least a good starting point. Global in more than one sense :

• Geographically : Australia, South America, Ireland (as far as candidates)
• Topically : Members with vastly different skills and experience
• Perspective : Looking at the whole picture

@alandavison, creating a summary is a very admirable intention. I guess that relates ideas behind having the ability to edit the Title and Context of an ongoing discussion. I don't know the Loomio cooperative's views on these things yet, though.

As someone who has often written minutes, public statements and summaries, I view it as a powerfully creative and influential process. I think it's generally good practice to get more at least a couple of people involved in gathering points and reviewing whatever is written, even if it's written by a sole author.

I don't necessarily support the shaping of an extended brainstorming session into some definite form, even if that occurs collaboratively. In the case of this particular discussion, I kind of viewed it as open-ended dialogue from the beginning, without any particular drive to create a proposal. However, I don't mean that worthwhile proposals couldn't come out of this talk. Like you, I currently have no idea what they might be.

@gregorycassel
I am not planning on writing anything in isolation. This is merely a starting point. The document will form the basis for testing various collaborative writing platforms so we can do a number of things at once.

I am trying to link (and document) as many of the ideas posted in this discussion as I feasibly can. Currently Loomio doesn't have the feature set to allow me to do this so my approach is to try open source tools and see how well they fit.

I realize that the link I posted may have seemed like a private invitation to only 2 members. For that reason I have started a separate post to promote this option to anybody who is interested. During the sign up you can choose to be added as an editor or simply to view the files.

collaborative tool testing

I do have to warn you that I have only been at this for a few hours and during that time have identified a number of issues / shortfalls with the software. Thanks to @dnephin for signing up and proving that the form actually works. I will be sending the links and invitations momentarily.

I must warn people that currently it is very much a work in progress but anybody active in this discussion is welcome.

@alandavison Thanks Alan, we're currently developing a new website as well as researching the hows and whys of the actual platform so feedback is great.

In terms of development, I personally think what is really needed is to bring all the different groups working on projects together into one place.

Rather than trying to turn Loomio into a system that can do everything it would be more practical to focus on its niche and really polish that. Meanwhile there are other platforms that perform slightly different functions, which may be more appropriate depending on what it is you wish to achieve.

@lbjoum @alandavison That sounds great about the group. Let us know what they say. Any of the names you have suggested sound fine to me.

If I can please do a basic check to see if we are all on the same page. What exactly are we all talking about here. It has no name, so I will try and spell out what I think we are talking about. I see three main aspects to this idea.

1. An internet based voting platform used by a population to make decisions/choices.

2. The decisions and choices made using the internet tool are be the same as that of the parliament.

3. An elected person in a parliament chooses to vote according to the decisions made in the internet platform - thus connecting the population directly into the parliamentary process.

Aspect 1 needs the most thought. Aspects 2 and 3 don't as much.

A powerful internet based voting method has not emerged yet. If/when it does, I predict it will be a new classification of social media. I am calling it direct democratic media (2DM).
The 2DM platform will mimic the structure of the government. For Australia will mirror the federal, state and local parliaments, each with the subsets of the houses. Each house will have a sub-set for every member of parliament. I call this level of the 2DM the e-polly. If loomio was able to have sub-groups of sub-groups I could build you an example of this structure.
Each level of 'real world' government has a shadow level in the 2DM.

Example: State level has a shadow state level, If the state has 2 houses of parliament there will be 2 shadow levels in the 2DM. If there are 100 members of parliament there will be 100 e-polly positions in the 2DM.
In our existing parliaments the politician is the place where all votes are made; but the M.P. may be part of a group (political party) or independent.

In the 2DM the votes can be collected at the e-polly level and tallied upwards or they can be voted at any other level and passed to each e-polly below carry into parliament. That is - the population could vote as an electorate or they could vote as a shire, state or country.
In the first situation citizens would only be able to cast their vote in the e-polly subset relevant to their electorate. I like this model best because it groups citizens into smaller groups and this would make it easier to do the checks and balances necessary to ensure the system is not being cheated. Like, each person/member/account holder of the 2DM will need to be verified as an eligible voter and real world person and non-duplicate. – but this process is another long discussion. It should also be noted that not every e-polly position will be connected into parliament with an elected person, so this option needs more definition. It is likely that only a small amount of e-polly positions will have elected members of parliament connecting them to government so they would have to carry the decisions of the entire 2DM platform into government. The obvious solution is to tally the votes to the house level and then all the sitting e-pollies would vote according to this outcome. But what if a particular electorate was directly effected by the decision? In this situation the members of that electorate should get a louder voice. I think it would be possible to build in mechanisms to make this possible.
Once you start to get into thinking about the algorithms that describe the 2DM process you see how many parts need to be considered. Like – what about the organisation that hosts the 2DM. If they are free to make all decisions about the way the 2DM is built then they gain positions of power. This is where I admire loomio for inviting all of us to participate in the process, and so I feel this could be done with a 2DM too.
It is great that you all are so interested in this topic but as you can see we do not have a common language to share this concept. As you can see I have developed my own ontology by using the concepts of 2DM and e-polly. But we still need to assign many more names. The whole concept still needs a name. I'm sure there are some good taxonomists (or whatever the skill is called) out there who can help.

@michaelsoth I've never claimed that direct democracy would automatically mean people make rational decisions. Far from it. However, the real question is this: what is more naive - getting people to participate in decisions that affect them or allowing a tiny fraction of people who need to obtain corporate backing to finance their campaigns to make all decisions without real accountability to do so? The former option gives you a chance - the latter is a recipe for disaster. Are people more likely to make decisions in their interests than career politicians who are rarely even aware of the life circumstances of most of their constituents? It would be hard for them not to.
Far from being naive, I think that I've set my own mental bar for "expected outcome" of this experiment a lot lower than most.

By the way, I personally think that widespread therapy would help people make more rational decisions and I think this is actually a very important goal to be pursuing. But again, it will take a long time for that to become widespread enough that we don't have too much irrationality clouding our judgment.

@lbjoum The last time I programmed Java was new (yikes), so I personally have no thoughts at all on the more complex aspects mirroring political structures, however the first bit all sounded good. For myself, my goal is to familiarise people with the idea of internet voting and more constant democratic participation. If I were to be elected, I would formally obligate myself to vote as my constituents desire, as long as participation reaches a certain quorum, which I'm sure would be another difficulty to overcome in the beginning. The vast majority of people do not get very many votes first-time around if they do not belong to a pre-existing party. I actually thought DemocracyOS's showing in Buenos Aires wasn't half-bad. I know people who are MPs now, who started with 1% of votes the first time they ran.

I agree with what you have said @Joum as a starting point.

Although I would personally add two clauses to points 2. and 3.

2: in a hypothetical future where direct democracy has replaced the representative system the current parliament structure is redundant. In a system where every representative is beholden to the same online public poles there is no purpose to a parliament as it currently functions.

3: It is impractical for direct democracy to function in a pure form, even with Internet making communication instant. I would suggest a hybridization with representative democracy - though through a different means than the current model. Instead, using social media style networks anyone could link themselves to another on specific topic to represent them. They would then automatically vote the same way when they did. Rather than holding elections you could change your representatives at any time, and any vote made by the individual would take precedence over a representative vote should the contradict.

I noticed something that can become a problem here. In a group of 10-12 persons discussing about 1 topic, we've generated over 100 comments. What will happen when thousands of persons start reading 1 proposal and giving their opinion about it?
That's why I think we need the representative part in this. People doesn't want to read all the comments to give their opinion. They don't have time for that. So reading comments and updating the original proposal and its abstract demands some structure. The elected may provide it.

The single identification must exist in order to not affect the results. Here in Brazil, we may use Electors ID, used for voting. Also we can think about signing petitions using the same platform.

I like the idea of having a minimum quorum to validate a proposal, once people must understand their importance in the system and motivate other people to also vote. The platform must allow to change that minimum rate.
Also we can give people the "I vote according to my representant" option. But this is risky because people may get lazy with that option. And we want people more participative, and not less.

Thanks for signing up @rorytb I have sent you the links you will need to get started.

@joaomarcelloortega yes I've noticed that too — and found it quite an overwhelming volume of text to keep up with.

In some discussions it can help to put up a proposal to get a snapshot of the group's feelings — because then everyone has a chance to make a short comment with their vote. And anyone can pretty quickly read the list of position statements and get the gist of the discussion.

@lbjoum you said -

A powerful internet based voting method has not emerged yet. If/when it does, I predict it will be a new classification of social media. I am calling it direct democratic media (2DM)

There are already dozens of voting "methods" some of which have been mentioned during the course of this discussion.

It is being argued that the choice of "voting method" should be determined based on the nature of the proposal being voted on, as well as the "outcome criteria" that is to say, what conditions must be met in order for that vote to pass, proceed to another level or require that the proposal be reworked (just a few possible outcomes).

I think what you are really referring to is a "secure voting platform" - a robust, reliable, fault-tolerant, secure, server infrastructure that can scale to cope with very large numbers of "unique" votes (cast on a wide variety of Internet connected devices). Similar to a payment gateway like PayPal or Worldpay but the transactions would be votes, the platform would require similar audit-ability and anti-tampering mechanisms.

Also I don't see collaborative decision making or online voting as a new form of social media and don't think it is helpful to introduce new acronyms into an already overcrowded technology space. 15 or more years ago the term "Alphabet Soup" was coined, the IT industry even created TLA as an acronym for "Three Letter Acronym" because so many were being created on a daily basis.

New tools that emerge to facilitate groups in collaboration and decision making will leverage current and emerging social media to promote, distribute and collect ideas, comments and feedback. This should then be aggregated into a much more flexible collaboration environment where "citizen groups" could do what we are doing here - discuss what we feel is important or relevant.

There still seems to be an emotional response to the use of the word "moderator" and @michaelsoth would say this is a good thing. We need collaborative frameworks that can include emotional elements as part of a human decision making system.

The complexity of this subject, and length of this thread, have become subjects unto themselves. ;) Forgive me for following that tangent a bit farther.

As some have mentioned, long threads are hard to follow and internalize. Actually, one of the things I like most about consensus process, and Loomio, is that people can avoid much of the potential mess associated with official or unofficial summaries.

In majoritarian voting, the quality of 'shared information' is always critically important, because a majority can impose their will upon a minority. In consensus, by contrast, a minority can always be heard. If anyone seems to discard or to accidently overlook a perspective, that minority can speak up.

That doesn't directly help people in crafting fair proposals, but it incentivizes it. Also, it depends on what someone intends with a given proposal. For instance, there's no obligation for any one proposal to cover the entire topic of discussion. Perhaps a group can only agree on one issue related to the topic, at a given time-- if they can agree at all. I don't see any need for people to agree on most things, as long as they can work together on things which are mutually important.

Of course, time's precious, and a good conversation can be held back by a proposal which is inappropriate, or too narrowly focused, or simply not as important as an alternate possibility. So, it's really helpful to try to craft a proposal which is both powerful and has a strong chance of being accepted, through group discussion.

I don't have much experience here, but I think the Loomio team considers it efficient and appropriate for each conversation to have only one proposal at a time. That way, if a problem proposal arises, people are practically 'forced' to deal with it. They can indicate if there's no way that that proposal will ever 'pass', and perhaps ask the creator to discontinue and/or replace it.

In a 'worst case' scenario, there's obviously nothing stopping anyone from starting a new conversation with another proposal related to the existing conversation. That could be divisive, especially if the proposals themselves seem to be in direct competition-- which, in pure consensus process, would surely doom both to failure. However, a second proposal could simply focus on a different aspect of an existing subject.

The 'Ideas' feature should help people to quickly see when an existing proposal is outclassed by any closely related alternatives. https://www.loomio.org/d/5Lxbd4Rs/ideas-proto-proposals

None of the existing mechanics or possible mechanics can create genuine consensus culture, as Loomio developers have mentioned before. I believe they want tools which will simply and clearly facilitate good practices in non-coercive online decision-making. 

It's arguable that I should have created a new thread for following the tangent above-- I just didn't desire to start a new conversation. Anyway, I hope people can follow the political voting discussion here!

@michaelsoth I have created a collaborative workspace for you to develop your ideas and thoughts relating to facilitation as you suggested.

I have downloaded and stored a copy of "The Tyranny of Structurlessness" in the shared folder for reference and also found an interesting link discussing the paper.

Beautiful Trouble - Beware the Tyranny of Structurlessness

The linked site also has other articles that may be of interest to this community. The site tag-line is "A Toolbox for Revolution"

@michaelsoth - the signup link is in my earlier posts

Food for thought from the above mentioned web site

There are as many organizational structures as there are philosophies of collective action. But they virtually all share one thing in common: for better or worse, they acknowledge their own structure, instead of hiding behind unlikely and obfuscating assertions of structurelessness. That acknowledgment, and the accountability it fosters, is the only way to ensure effective and equitable decision-making.

Structurelessness is often mistakenly conflated with absence of hierarchy, when in fact, effective non-hierarchical forms of organizing actually require a great deal of structure. Anyone who has participated in an effectively facilitated general assembly or spokescouncil meeting will well understand this distinction.

by Josh Bolotsky

PS - His website currently has a technical issue that promises to be resolved shortly....

Voting platforms are easy to develop and use. Consensus building on the other hand, is not so easy. I'm hoping we can get Loomio to the point that it's better than it already is at helping build consensus.

Beautiful Trouble - Beware the Tyranny of Structureless

@alandavison Definitely interesting. I think this is more of an issue for organizational structure not necessarily decision making. While I think they are related, they are definitely separate concerns. A good proposal should include "goal" criteria, and identify parties responsible for meeting those goals, which hopefully addresses these problems.

Maybe one way to encourage that is to provide separate fields in a proposal to provide those details (although I'm not sure I'm really a fan of that).

@dnephin I'm actually in favor of fields driven by consensus. A clearly defined problem, goal and then solution. Even the process of creating those is going to be helpful for the communities using the software.

Voting platforms are easy to develop and use. Consensus building on the other hand, is not so easy

While we're on the topic, I've always thought of voting as just the final step in a decision making process. The earlier parts of the process include research, and debate of the trade-offs. I see these earlier steps as almost more important than the final decision. It's what allows us to learn from decisions, and to make better ones in the future. It's also what allows us to understand what the decisions actually mean (if we lose the context, we lose the ability to understand the words, see: "the right the bear arms").

So often in our current systems these critical steps happen very privately, and are almost never publicly available.

I think the most appealing part of loomio (and consensus) is that it encourages the earlier parts of the process to happen in the open. Instead of just registering "yes" or "no", you're almost required to provide more context about your preference. At the very least, some parties, on either side of the debate, are required to provide something. And all of that process is recorded publicly.

I'd personally like to see that part of the process developed further (less of a focus on voting models, more on making the decision process public and accessible). Even if you don't use the consensus model to make the final decision, you benefit from the earlier steps of the process.

@michaelsoth thanks for the feedback and your input.

I feel to some extent we're talking at cross purposes fuelled by misunderstandings.

Perhaps it would be good to try and highlight some of these misunderstandings. I look forward to hearing what you think when you have more time.

I sent you the invitations - perhaps you would like to edit your post and remove the email address?

There has been a lot of discussion on this topic and it can be a bit overwhelming to sort through it to understand the issue properly, which seems to highlight the complexity of this kind of voting/discussion as much as the actual discourse taking place.

Perhaps it would be helpful to create sub-discussions on specific aspects of the issue that could be voted on / discussed individually and then reported to the main thread? It seems like whenever the is a big issue one problem with tackling it is that there are multiple angles involved all at once. If it were possible and efficient to break it into smaller parts then it would be easier to find the key issues that need to be worked on rather than trying take it all in at once.

And this is where I think we can start to look for ways to help improve Loomio. How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces? What would Loomio need to do?

@adamglickman , I really like that idea generally. I don't personally think in terms of main discussion and sub-discussion, which is a hierarchical view, as if the more specific discussions are subordinate to the broad topic. This is pretty radical of me, although I imagine that some people here relate to it.

I think it's possible for the general topic (say, Loomio in politics) to end up being a general discussion which does not result in any sort of consensus, but which does act as an outstanding brainstorming and creative tool, fueling more specific topics and potential agreements.

@gregorycassel This is my thought as well.

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces?

This is exactly the question I'm trying to answer. My proposal from an earlier post in this topic (and also an idea I've been playing with for some time now):

My feeling is that the software tool should handle these concerns. I think that can be accomplished by moving away from a single chronologically ordered list of responses, to a a directed rooted tree (or directed graph) structure.

Discussions can branch freely without requiring extra effort on the participants. As a participant you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the branches you’re interested in. A new participant joining the discussion only needs to follow the branches they’re interested in, which would be a small fraction of the entire discussion. This makes auditing a lot easier as well (for the same reason, it’s easier to find the related posts).

Technically, how would a discussion branch without any effort from the participants? Just curious if this has been implemented elsewhere. @dnephin

@dnephin, I think something like that would be very helpful. I'd like to add to it by suggesting some system by which key results could be displayed more publically "up the chain" so to speak. That way when having a discussion like this one "Political Use..." you could start a discussion and then, depending on how it goes, turn it into a "brainstorming" topic with your top ideas clearly visible without needing to dig into the discussion for a specific post.

@BenBurton, to branch a discussion might be through a quick vote e.g. Proposal: Branch from this post to "Political Uses Brainstorming session". Then that post would serve as a starting point for the branch under a new topic.

From a functional perspective I would think some combination of a wiki or survey capability might help to keep the discussion clear though it might be necessary to only have certain functions available for specific types of branches (brainstorming vs direct voting). Anyone could obviously create a new branch if they didn't like the restriction but it might keep the goal clear.

I don't know of anything that does it right now, it's something I've been experimenting with 1, 2, 3

It's definitely a bit of a challenge. Responses would have parents, so instead of a view being all posts chronologically, you would have multiple child responses per post, formating a directed graph.

Views would be a either:
1. a single path from root to leaf, of which there would be many
2. just immediate context around a given response (including immediate parent, the origin section from the root topic, and immediate child posts)

@dnephin , I've been thinking that Loomio already easily allows for discussions to become more focused, simply by creating a more specific topic and inviting people to it. Of course, there is some risk of mess-- there's always some risk of mess-- but this feels more organic to me than creating a nested structure. A nested structure can be very efficient and effective, but it is a hierarchical structure. If a group of people are genuinely acting freely, without coercion or formal constraints, then they can create focal points according to their varying desires for shared focus and shared meaning.

For instance, if I created some other thread related to this topic, people could choose to either engage or not engage, according to the perceived value of my 'related topic'. Someone else might create an alternate topic which is more interesting. Neither topic would be subordinate to this topic.

If a group is genuinely operating according to shared interests, then any tendency towards an explosive 'mess' of topics could be addressed and dealt with collectively. For instance, people might informally agree not to create new 'related topics' without getting a certain number of 'likes' for a given comment, or perhaps even having an actual poll ('Decision') for the new topic creation.

And of course, people can always informally encourage others to not engage in an extraneous topic. In the future, I'm hopeful that an archiving feature will become available, per this recent discussion: https://www.loomio.org/d/HaE6ux1C/archiving-discussions?proposal=138XCcDa

@dnephin

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces?

As you know this is something that I have been working on as well, I have introduced some initial thoughts in the LiveMinutes project folder.

For anybody else interested in testing other software tools, cel.ly is an alternative social network, group discussion tool introduced by a new member to the loomio community who is a developer of cel.ly that already implements some features that would be useful to Loomio discussions.

I’d like to add to it by suggesting some system by which key results could be displayed more publicly “up the chain”

I agree, I was also thinking that extra activity on a branch would be a signal that the branch was important, so you're able to discover these important branches very organically without human intervention.

Another aspect of the system is that each post requires some "position" on the previous post. "accept", "support", "challenge", "oppose", etc. That way a post with many accept/support is immediately visible. Things with lots of challenges need more research.

@gregorycassel

For instance, if I created some other thread related to this topic, people could choose to either engage or not engage, according to the perceived value of my ‘related topic’.

I think this assumes that everyone is approaching a topic with the same understanding. I think often enough a proposal happens and it takes time for everyones understanding to coalesce. Having to create a new topic, and lose all the valuable context would be a shame.

Neither topic would be subordinate to this topic.

I wouldn't think of my post as subordinate to your post, just becomes it's coming after. It's simply a reply in a chain of communication. It's the same in a graph. Anyone is free to create a new branch from the top level, or from any point in the graph. None are subordinate to another, they are simply responses to previous comments.

The last 11 posts, although interesting are not directly related to "Political use for Loomio" and are actually "functional requirements" for any software tool trying to order the chaos that is linear group discussion.

What we are doing here could be done in any standard online Forum.

@alandavison I will have to check that out as well. I still owe you a response about liveminutes. I need to take some more time to look at what it offers.

@gregorycassel

And of course, people can always informally encourage others to not engage in an extraneous topic.

I don't see these branches as extraneous topics at all. It's simply a different perspective on the problem. I think it actually enriches the discussion by including these different perspectives. The challenge is being able to include them without everyone losing focus of the different threads.

In reality I think I'm just trying to create a better model for what is the natural way we communicate. As someone talks (or posts) we may different thoughts about each thing they say. Being able to respond to each individually allows us to focus in on specifics much faster.

The last 11 posts, although interesting are not directly related to “Political use for Loomio” and are actually “functional requirements” for any software tool trying to order the chaos that is linear group discussion.

What we are doing here could be done in any standard online Forum.

Correct. This is why I think of Loomio as a forum with high powered consensus based voting. It's a good start, but I think the requirements for what it wants to do could be better laid out.

Loomio wants to be software that helps communities make decisions. I hope we can help push it down that path with more accurate requirements.

@adamglickman A proposal to branch is a great idea.

@dnephin - I introduced cel.ly here because they use hashtags to highlight posts and have voting and polling mechanisms. I haven't tested it yet because I just installed it and don't have a group to participate in yet.

It also allows @me tagging to create personal notes

@dnephin

I don’t see these branches as extraneous topics at all. It’s simply a different perspective on the problem.

And this is one of the issues. If Loomio would help people clearly define a problem, it would also help them keep a discussion on track or set up a divergent thread to discuss a different portion of a problem.

@dnephin I wasn't referring to anything here as extraneous, but rather, the generic possibility of people creating extraneous topics and/or proposals in a group without a structured conversational hierarchy. My apologies for lack of clarity.

@alandavison , I agree that this thread could happen in any forum, although I don't blame that on Loomio. I think that's simply what we are doing here. It probably reflects the fact that 'Loomio in politics' is an extremely broad subject, upon which few of us may entirely agree.

@gregorycassel you said

I’ve been thinking that Loomio already easily allows for discussions to become more focused, simply by creating a more specific topic and inviting people to it.

If you check out the posts from @lbjoum you will see that it hasn't worked for SOL. One of the issues they have is too many empty sub-topics or sub-groups. In their case discussion has become more fractured rather than focused and participation in group discussion has diminished.

There will, without doubt be a specific discussion, topic or forum for "requirements" and there is certainly a specific topic for "feature requests"

Does anybody here have any experience with "Brainstorming" or "Mind Mapping" software?

@BenBurton you said

How can this tool be designed to help separate a discussion into smaller, more manageable pieces? What would Loomio need to do?

myself and @dnephin have pointed out a few ideas already, wary of course that this is not the correct thread for this discussion. We are actively researching this area and will be working together to test some other software tools and report back on our findings.

@alandavison , I strongly support providing one or more tools for dealing with empty sub-topics and empty subgroups. I believe that the (hoped for) Archiving feature, which I mentioned before, would deal nicely with inactive 'sub-topics' (or inactive topics of any sort.) Loomio has also been recently discussing ways of dealing with abandoned subgroups, per https://www.loomio.org/d/hwJpfkeN/parent-group-ability-to-remove-sub-group?proposal=tY9zwWmF

I think there are many ways to do such things, with or without a technically hierarchical format.

@dnephin , you wrote

I think this assumes that everyone is approaching a topic with the same understanding. I think often enough a proposal happens and it takes time for everyones understanding to coalesce. Having to create a new topic, and lose all the valuable context would be a shame.

One of my main personal concerns is actually the fact that no one ever, in my opinion, approaches any topic with the same understanding(s). I think that a consensus decision-making tool can help lots, without creating a hierarchy of related topics. However, I'm not opposed to the provision of such a technical tool, if others are interested in it, and if the Loomio team or some open source derivative are willing and able to develop it.

As far as related proposals go, I think that the upcoming Ideas tool will help to funnel interests on that front. Ideas will be connected to an active proposal, as alternatives to it. I think this can help people to avoid getting too fragmented in their discussions. It really does require work on consensus process and communication, though. For instance, if some 'Idea' looks popular and an active proposal is going nowhere, people will need to learn how to constructively confront that problem.

@gregorycassel at this stage we will have to agree to disagree, my experience is that creating multiple discussion threads does not produce focus, especially if the threads are like this one, long, complex, chronological posts.

I just realized that I've engaged extensively in more of the tangent here which isn't really about Loomio+politics at all. I would like to personally stop doing that. I would encourage anyone including @dnephin , @alandavison to create another topic on the subject of 'sub-topics', or anything else fundamental to Loomio. (I'm not trying to 'get the last word in' either, haha; I'm just indicating what I think would be best here, at some point.)

@dnephin, @BenBurton, @gregorycassel, @adamglickman

Here is an example of one group using votebot for voting (suprisingly)

openpolitics.org voting

clicking on the title link for a specific "vote item" leads to github to discuss and fork proposals.

The Open Democracy Stack

Another interesting blog post from James Smith, the Open Politics, Something New candidate ...

Conclusion
The world of Open Democeacy is one with many pieces, and how they all fit together isn’t necessarily obvious at the first look. Anyone who wants to contribute to this (including myself) should understand the ‘stack’ to know which ideas fit where.

And of course, all this could be wrong, it’s just my assessment of it. If anyone wants to enlighten me further, please do, and please contribute to all the open democracy efforts that are out there, at whatever level you feel is most appropriate for you.

open democracy stack

Going back to topic about ways to branch a discussion, we could learn something from the web here. It keeps the original content and use hyperlinks for more related content. Readers can choose to stay or to move to a new one more insteresting.
While reading the comments above I imagined something like: "This conversation has a new branch about 'X'. Click here to move to this new discussion." or "@joao created a new conversation about 'X'."
This could be inserted by anyone right beside the paragraph when the topic split.

None of the people in the group have objected.
https://www.loomio.org/g/GRQl4yUT/global-direct-democracy-working-group
I will give people another week but I would say we can use this loomio group if we want. If the people from this thread want to join the page I will make you coordinators.

@lbjoum It's a public group, so not sure how to 'join' the page?

@jgrey My deepest apologies. It was set to invitation only. I am not sure how that happened, this group has always been open.

It is now public.

Thanks @lbjoum !

Hi. I needed a list of contributors in this discussion to check who has joined the new group and make coordinators. For my own reference and yours I am posting it here.

Adam Glickman
Alan Davison
Ben Burton
Daniel Nephin Y
Greg Cassel Y
J. Gray Y
João Marcello Ortega
Joum Y
Matthew Bartlett (Loomio helper)
Michael Soth
Richard D. Bartlett
rory tb Y
Roslyn Y

https://www.loomio.org/g/GRQl4yUT/global-direct-democracy-working-group

For those of you in New Zealand, I have made this group and please join. Am hoping to get as many kiwis and NZ residents involved as possible. Will be an interesting experiment.